


He Who Comes to Me Shall not Hunger

by Carbon65



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Batman and Robin (Comics), Under the Red Hood
Genre: Buried Alive, Canon Compliant, Canon Temporary Character Death, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Gritty, Hurt No Comfort, Medical Procedures, Resurrected Jason Todd, Resurrection, Second Person, Temporary Amnesia, Unreliable Narrator, temporally scrambled
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-27
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2019-11-06 17:04:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17943686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carbon65/pseuds/Carbon65
Summary: You came into the world the first time fighting. Your mother labored in a dirty, over crowded ward, and the doctor cut you from her belly when you would not come. They wrapped you in a receiving blanket, and handed you to another woman. Pain was your first companion, and pain would be your last memory.You will come into the world the second time fighting. Fighting and pushing and clawing and alone. It will take time for your senses to start working again. Pain will be first, and pain will be last and pain will be with you always.





	He Who Comes to Me Shall not Hunger

**1**.

When you come back, the cold, damp, darkness will pervade your body, and you will feel just how long you have been cold. You will gasp for air, as your lungs remember what they are there for, and you will sputter and cough and choke on your own windpipe and your own lungs until they start again.

You heart will start out faintly, and you’ll feel dizzy like the world is spinning, spinning, spinning and you’re going to pass out, except that you once overhead Dick telling Garth that you can’t faint while lying down, and if Dick said it…

And then, as the shining black pinpricks of your eyes start to clear, but before the world stops spinning, you will feel your hands light on fire as the blood rushes back in to where it has not been, bringing oxygen with it. It will burn, and sting, and you will want to scream, but you won’t have quite enough breath to make the sound.

And then, your fingers, clumsy with still-pooling blood and burning with the return of life, and your nails still loose from six months of not being held quite so tightly, will tear at the lid of the box as the panic sets in. As you realize just where you are. Just how you are. And, you will scream this time. You will scream and you will scream and you will scream.  
And, no one will hear you.

 

**2**.

You will come into the world the second time fighting. Fighting and pushing and clawing and alone. No one will be there to catch you as you fight through the pressing darkness into a cold world. There will be no receiving blanket, but you will bring your own: the shroud they wrapped you in when they laid you down. You will think the ground was cold, but there will be a cold wind and the sky will promise rain. And, you will stand there, shivering and pale as a ghost while your fingers drip blood on a stone with a name someone else gave you. You will not know if it is what you call yourself, yet. You will not know what to call yourself, newly reborn as you will be.

It will take time for your senses to start working again. Pain will be first, and pain will be last and pain will be with you always. Then, temperature and pressure. Not texture, just whether or not something is there. You will stumble over the gravel walkway and up to a hard road, and you will not know if the rocks are sharp, only that they are hard and cold and your feet hurt.

Smell will come next, sharp and cold and damp. And then, musty and acrid. And then, coppery and close.

Taste will return, and your mouth will taste like something died inside, and then like you’ve been sucking at pennies, and then bloody and sore. And then dead again. And, you will know what death feels like, how decay tastes.

Sound, next, the screaming echoing through the night as you stumble blindly toward the sound, because even though everything about it will make you afraid, something else will tell you that you should go toward it. That you must go toward it.

Sight will come last, swimming and blurry and full of flashing red and white and blue. Light and dark and light and dark and unholy wailing.

And then, dark. And then, quiet.

 

**10.**

Your body will remember before your mind does. Your body will do all sorts of things while you watch, separate from it. Your body will feel the man pick you up, and it will spring into action. Muscles that have been long dormant will respond to some unheard call, and he will go down.

You will hurt the next day. You will hurt so much the next day.

You will not know what it means.

 

**6.**

They will try to figure out who you are.

The police will come and try to take your fingerprints, forgetting that you came in with the tips of your fingers bloodied and unrecognizable. The tips are still pink and puffy around where the nails are slowly starting to come in under bandages. Even when the bandages come off, the scars will still marr the whorls and twists that used to be there, making them unrecognizable. Even if your prints _were_ recognizable still, there would not be any record of who you were in the system.

Then, they will think of dental records. Except that by the time they think of that, you will have seen a dentist to fix the five broken teeth and replace the implant that you lost when they buried you. Your jaw will be wired shut, as soon as they move the tube from your mouth to down your throat and from your nose to your stomach. And, you will have those tubes for a long time. It won’t matter, though, because by that point, the dental x-rays won’t help.

They will think of DNA, briefly, before realizing there is nothing to compare to. If you’re not in their system, if your parents aren’t in their system, how could they identify you? You’re not there. You’re not, and your mother and father aren’t, and as far as they can find, you’ve got no female relatives with any DNA record.

They will call you John, for lack of anything better. The J will feel right, in that part of your mind that’s still attached to your body, and the rest will itch in a place that you can’t quite scratch. It won’t matter, not really, not that much. What’s a string of sounds in tying a mind and a soul that are supposed to be dead to a body that doesn’t know if it wants to stay alive.

 

**4.**

They will take you to the hospital where they will care for you. They will wrap you in sedative so thick your brain will not be able to emerge from the heavy fog that fills it. You will lose the senses you thought you had gained: the sight, the sound, the taste, the smell, the touch, until only pain remains. And, they will try to extinguish that, too.  
They will not know the pain does not live in your body. They will not know that the pain does not live in your mind. They will think they are helping, wrapping you in protective layers until there is nothing to feel but pain. They will not realize that the thing that hurts most is your soul, and they will have no medicine that can heal that broken part.

In the hospital, they will take you apart and put you back together again. Your body will not be sure if it wants to stay alive. Being dead is quieter. Being dead is less work. Your lungs will think about stopping. When your breath catches too much, they will put a tube in and force your chest to rise and fall.

Your heart will think about stopping, will slow and stutter because it will not know how to beat regularly. They will cut open your chest along the Y-shaped scar that will still look red and will has not yet have had a chance to heal, and they will put in a little motor to jump start you again.

They will put in a tube to pass food in when you forget that you need to eat because the dead not eat. They will pass in another for water and another to collect your waste. Your body will have forgotten how to do all these things: how to breathe and eat and swallow and pee.

You will have forgotten that they are necessary. You will have forgotten everything while your body is wrapped in that constant sheet of white hot, muffling, unending pain.

 

**7.**

They will take the tubes out one by one by one. First, your body will remember how to breathe again. you will learn how to breathe again, how to take and keep and hold the breaths. It will take two months before your lungs truly decide they need to keep breathing all the time.  
Even after the tube comes out, it will leave you with a scar as a reminder.

They will still make you sleep with a mask because they will be afraid that you will forgot to breathe. Even when it’s been weeks and weeks and weeks, they will make you continue to wear the mask to sleep, until part of your fuzzy brain wonders if this is simply what everyone does before they sleep: someone to come and wash their face and brush their teeth and put on their sleeping mask to help them breathe.

They will pry the tube out of the back of your hand, eventually replacing it with a port where they can plug things in. It will smell like harsh alcohol and feel like cold and fuzziness.

When you start coming back into yourself, they will discover that you remember how to pee for yourself, and that tube will be removed. It will take time for that to come back (it takes time for everything to come back), but you will be so relieved when it does.

They will leave the tube in your stomach for last. You will not be able to eat enough. Your jaw will hurt with phantom pain from something you cannot remember and real pain from being broken and half healed before they realized it and then reset and wired. Your gums will bleed until everything in your mouth tastes of blood and you will not want anything but ice chips. But, they will find that if your stomach stays empty for too long, your body will collapse on itself and your heart will flutter and something inside of you will demand energy from somewhere, to fix a body that’s supposed to be beyond healing.

They will try pushing you to drink heavy, frothy concoctions that taste sweet and feel like chalk on your tongue. They will ply you with soft foods, with cooked vegetables, with everything they can think of. And, none it will work. None of it will be enough. So, late at night when everyone else will have gone to sleep and the nurses will be ready to sit down with their coffee and their newspaper and the talk of the Batman on TV who Yvonne’s neighbor’s sister’s kid’s boyfriend once saw stalking the streets with his brightly colored sidekick, that’s when they will hook you up for your feeds. And, you will sit cold and alone in your bed while the machine pumps you full of the formula your [re]-growing body will need.

 

**3.**

You will know one word, and one word only. You will have one thought in your mind. Bruce. You need Bruce. Bruce can fix this. You can for him, cry for him, scream for him with everything that’s in you.

Bruce will not come.

 

**9.**

It will take months, months and months and months, but after enough time, you will remember enough and you will leave. You will slip out the side door while everyone else is cleaning up from lunch, and you will go.

You will sleep on the streets. Your sleep will not be peaceful, your sleep has not been peaceful for a long time. Not even your death has been peaceful. Why should that change when you leave the locked ward for the open streets?

You will be hungry. You will be constantly hungry. Your body will still be fighting to rebuild whatever you lost, and you will no longer have the late night feedings with the nurses where they gossip about Bruce Wayne and Janet Drake and the new reality show about the Queens of Star City. You will have to find your own food.

You will steal. You are good at stealing. You don’t remember why you are so good at it, but you are good. You get food. You will get tampons. You get shampoo and soap and conditioner. Not just the stuff that they give out in the shelter, that all-in-one crap that feels like sandpaper against your skin, but a soap that will smell familiar like the half forgotten memory of an old man’s comforting arms around your shoulders and a whisper that someone is proud of you.

 

**8.**

You will come back to yourself slowly. Not truely back, you will not be _You_. But, you will be someone rather than this blank slate of a creature that you’ve been.

You will hate Barney and love Sesame Street and Judge Judy.

When they make you eat food, you will want to mix strawberry and vanilla ice cream together into a gray-brown swirl. You will relish the taste of hot dogs as they give you little bites, cut up to make sure you cannot choke.  
You will still hate eating.

You will like being outside. You will like the feeling of the sunlight on your face. But, you will also be afraid of it. Something about the bright light will remind you of a place far away. You will remember shifting sands and hot sun and tends and white make-up. The day you go to the beach with the other patients, you will spend the entire trip cowering in the car because the hot sand and the bright sun will remind you… will remind you… will remind you of...  
Night will be better. The moonlight will be like a gentle caress on your face, and rain in the darkness will feel like a kiss. The nights you sleep the best, the only nights you really sleep, will be the nights after the shadow of the bat has shone and been extinguished. And, when you dream, if you dream, you will dream of a black cape and a cowl and a gruff voice telling you that you done good.

 

**11.**

She will tell you her name is Talia and she will call you Jason. You will not know if you are Jason, if you are Bruce, if you are anyone else. But, after two years of a borrowed name, Jason will settle on you with a comforting, re-assuring weight.

She will let you train, force you to train. Your body will remember. Your body will know what to do. Your body will be ready.  
Your mind will not be.

You will do what she tells you. You will eat when she tells you. You will sleep when she tells you. You will fight when she tells you. You will cry when she tells you.  
You will be exactly who she tells you to be.

Your mind will still be buried under layers of heavy fog. Your soul will be shrouded in the darkness that it was shrouded in when you went into the ground. Your body will remember, but you will not be you.

And so, she will do something. She will push you in.

 

**5.**

They will send you for scans, trying to figure out the mystery of how you are alive. There will be too many marks that they cannot explain unless they have another image. How can your legs hold your weight, given the hairline fracture across your tibia? How can they manage at all, given the shadow of a bruise along your spinal cord? They will say your ribs should have punctured a lung… may have punctured a lung… will puncture your lung at some point. They will warn each other to watch you closely in case that happens. They will work too hard to save your life to just let you die that way.

Mostly, they will wonder about your sternum. It was crushed, but there is a line down the middle as though parts were cut with a bone saw. It will be cut below that Y-shaped scar. Your scar will scare your doctors.

They will not be able to explain why you are alive.

 

**12.**

You will come into the world the third time naked and fighting.

You will be surrounded in pain. You will feel like you are on fire, and you will know that pain is your only companion. Pain will come first, and pain will be last and pain will be with you always.

The liquid that is not water will flow over you, and it will burn whatever it touches: burn and dance and tingle like nerves waking up. Your eyes will go black with stars and the blood will roar in your ears, and your whole body will feel like it is on fire. You will scream and scream as your mouth fills with the choking liquid and it pours down your throat and into your lungs and washes over you. You will try to scream as it fills your lungs, burning you from the inside out.

You will feel your chest slip open along a scar as something floats out.

And, as you are emersed in that bath, screaming, screaming, screaming, the veil around your thoughts will start to lift. And, you will remember. And, you will scream more for the memory of it all.

Because, then, you will know. And it will hurt.

First, you will realize that you have died. It will seem obvious, maybe even inane to say. It won’t matter, you will need to say it to yourself. You died.

Your human body and your human mind will never be entirely equipped for that resurrection. Not without some kind of outside help to come in and correct it. Not without this burning, cloying, choking liquid that is forcing its way through your head, peeling away layers of trauma and pain. Your human body and human mind may not even be equipped for a near-miss, where you didn’t quite die, but you flirted with it the way you flirt with a pretty girl at a club: leering and loud and close. You will know, even as your body is healed, that there’s an order life is supposed to follow: you come into the world, screaming and naked; you fight your way through on your own, finding what you need and hoarding it closely; and then, you die, screaming and naked and alone. And then, you stay dead.

No one will have to tell you that coming back is not like stepping out and coming back into your life. You will remember the life you had before. A pair of shiny hubcaps. A man named Bruce. The comforting wings of a bat. The weight of Kevlar on your shoulders. A golden R. You will remember the life you had before, but you will know that you can never re-enter it. You will know that when you died, you stood still and the world kept moving, kept tilting on its axis and spinning without your knowledge. And, the death that pinned you down while the world kept moving tore your right out of the place that you were. If you’re lucky - but when you have ever been lucky - if you’re lucky, you get excised from the world around you with sharp, precise surgical blades and then sewn back into that hole with the finest silk thread. If you’re unlucky, you’ll get torn out like a toddler pulls a page out of a glossy magazine, crumpled and worn and torn, chewed up and spit out, and damaged so badly that you’ll always see the wrinkles and the tape.

You will scream and scream and scream as the Lazurus pit tries to iron out those wrinkles and tear the tape away. You will scream as your brain remembers, and it burns away the last bits of comfort around you.

You will scream as you realize that your soul is still broken. That it remembers how you are only supposed to die once, and that this burning, healing, saving liquid cannot save you.

 

**13.**

You will stand over a grave, over this grave, and look out from the safety of a red hood. The mask will hide who you were then, and who you are now. The mask will protect you from having to look at yourself too closely in the mirror. It will protect you from ever having to see lines around your eyes that your sixteen-year-old self shouldn’t have. It will protect you from knowing the constellation of burn scars come from a bomb that blew you up. It will conceal that shock of white hair that you never used to have. It will let you hide who you were, and who you are.

You will stand over a grave, over this grave, and you will look your father in the eye. You will ask him where his son is. You will ask him if he has avenged his child. You will ask him if he regrets exchanging the life of his child for a set of principles that kill the people he thought he loved.

You will listen to his answer, and stares at the stone with the that was, and then will not be, and will again be yours. You will listen to the answer, and want to know if he knows you.

And, that small part of you, deep inside, the small part that was not burned away in the acid of the Lazurus pit will wonder where Bruce was when you came to in the cold, damp, darkness.


End file.
